


To yearn for love, is to rot alive

by Baryshnikov



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Inspired by Killing Eve (TV 2018), Killing Eve AU, M/M, Murder Fantasy, Sexual Tension, Violent Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-14
Updated: 2020-08-14
Packaged: 2021-03-06 05:22:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25888045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Baryshnikov/pseuds/Baryshnikov
Summary: When MI6 agent Harry thinks Tom, the subject of a cat-and-mouse game that has spread all over Europe, is in Rome, he does the logical thing and breaks into his apartment, unfortunately, Tom is not in Rome.
Relationships: Harry Potter/Tom Riddle
Comments: 4
Kudos: 78





	To yearn for love, is to rot alive

**Author's Note:**

> This, as you'll probably be able to tell, this is really just an out of context scene from a longer fic that I lost the motivation to write; but, as I have already written it and it kind of makes sense, I'm posting it anyway.

Harry was sitting awkwardly on the edge of the bed and Tom was in the chair across the room, his legs tucked under him in faux fragility as though Harry was the dangerous one. Well, perhaps he was, but in that crazy, uncontrolled, way filled with mania and adrenaline; he could stab because biology and panic had taught him how, and that wasn’t anything like what Tom was capable of doing.

He had been trained, excessively, to hold a knife with the sole purpose of using it to stab a person to death—how to twist the metal at just the right angle and how to smile at the consequence because, although, there was something intrinsically wrong about him he had been taught to embrace it like children are taught to embrace their hobbies. But, in a way, that was what was beautiful; it was what made Tom special, because he could hold someone so close—so intimate—and murmur to them what their corpse was going to look like. He could make that murmur a reality so easily and as soon as it was done, he could just walk away.

No guilt, no shame, no regrets. 

And yet, sitting there on the loveseat, pressed right into the corner, with his hand pale and clutching weakly at the arm of the chair, he looked soft and guarded like he was scared; like he wasn’t a man who could leave a trail of bloody carnage behind him like he hadn’t probably already thought of at least five ways to kill Harry. 

Maybe it was his clothes, the mellowed shades and soft material making him look harmless—almost innocent—in a way that his sharp suits couldn’t. If anyone were to glance at him now, they would just see a rabbit sitting there, wary and worried, and it was only if they looked—really looked—they would see the emptiness in that rabbit’s eyes. The hollow, soulless, look of someone who had caused so much death that they were all but its harbinger. 

“What are you doing in my apartment?” Tom said, his tone careful, controlled, and with the slightest hint of hesitation slithering between the syllables, but whether it was genuine or just another one of Tom’s imitations of humanity Harry was reluctant to say. Certainly, he was watching him with an almost unnerving intensity, his gaze heavy enough that Harry found himself shifting and glancing at the floor. 

“I needed—I wanted to see you,” he said, and it was hopelessly—desperately—true, he wanted and needed to see Tom if only to look at him and work out what he was feeling. This was the final step as it were and he was standing on the edge of the abyss, his arms outstretched reaching for something he didn’t even know how to describe. Harry had never felt this way before, not with his wife, not with anyone.

It was such an intense feeling—this desire to be close to Tom—to hold him by the throat and stare into those empty eyes, while at the same time wanting to kiss him until he choked. 

There was a novelty to that feeling, after all, Harry had rarely done anything he _wanted_ ; life seemed to be too full of _needs_ that had to be dealt with before such indulgent things as wants could be satisfied. Ever since he could remember, he had always had to think of his friend's needs, of his wife’s needs, of the needs that came about as a consequence of his actions; being so altruistic was just exhausting. But now, sitting here, so close to Tom, he needed to be selfish. 

He _wanted_ to be selfish. 

For there were things that Harry had never felt before swirling under his skin—a form of desire that was simmering hot and low, stretching out his blood vessels and burning through his organs. Everything inside him was being torn to pieces and the only constant was Tom sitting there, so still, with those black, asphyxiating eyes and watching him as if he could see into his very soul. 

And, although Harry didn’t want to admit it, Tom was like a diamond, he split apart the light and reflected out to everyone only the parts of himself that Harry liked to see—those marvellous parts of him that had fuelled his youthful dreams of success. Tom had the power to turn that irritating impulsivity that afflicted Harry, into a sharp-edged confidence, and that awkward obsession he had cultivated in the years of sitting in an office doing paperwork into an absurd fascination that was as grotesque as it was heady. 

Tom made his mundane little life seem like the most interesting thing in the universe and Harry wasn’t sure that he’d be able to go back to the way things were before he’d met him. Before he’d become the person, he’d always dreamed on being—that globetrotting agent who was really _helping_ people and the country—not some desk jockey with a weird hobby. 

Tom was still watching him, his eyes staying fixed on Harry’s face like he was trying to read words that were imprinted on the inside of his skull, though, Tom was probably intimately aware of the insides of other people’s skulls. 

“Can I ask why you’re _here_ when everyone said you were in Rome?” Harry said, hating the sounds of exasperation that were infusing themselves into every syllable, like a child caught stealing sweeties from the jar, and not a fully grown adult—but really, where was the difference? Just like a child standing on a chair to reach the highest, most forbidden, shelf, Harry had been found somewhere he shouldn’t be, doing something he shouldn’t be, and he felt like a fool.

Tom merely raised an eyebrow as he tilted his neck to glance lazily out the window, “because this is _my_ apartment, Harry, and I live here,” he said, and Harry tried to ignore the exposed stretch of his neck lighted by the afternoon sun and shifting as he spoke.  
“The bigger question begging to be asked,” Tom continued, his whole body shifting now; uncoiling like a snake until the typical predaciousness that Harry was used to, had returned to every limb, “is why are _you_ in my bed?” he said, turning his head back towards Harry and dragging his gaze up the length of his legs and over his torso, lingering too long on his neck, before meeting his eyes, “after all,” he said, “you certainly don’t live here.”

“Umm—?” Harry said, scrunching his hands into the duvet as hot shame prickled at his ears and burnt a trail down his neck, licking at his skin until it was an unattractive shade of pink. “I’m sorry—it just…” He started to get up, feeling too much like a schoolboy caught behind the bike sheds.

But before he could even get on his feet, Tom was speaking again, “I asked you _why_ ,” he said smoothly, his tone neutral but demanding, the sort of thing you’d use when torturing someone, though they knew from the evidence that Tom was too impatient to be useful for information extraction, “I didn’t say you should get up.”

Harry stopped, his hands sticking to the duvet and his heart beating too fast to be normal. He swallowed. Tom was still watching him though he was shifting again, unfolding himself properly, like a caterpillar coming out of its cocoon and, with the movement, there was an accompanying shift in the air itself. The light coming through the window was softer now, and almost romantic; painted with pigments the colour of almonds and diluted with shades of pink and orange. 

It was in that light that Tom stood up, his silhouette a black blot against the sky. “I didn’t say you should get up,” he said again, walking towards the bed, his pace marked by his weight on the floorboards, “because I think you look good in my bed, Harry.”

The bed dipped as Tom climbed onto it, close enough to him for Harry to feel the irrepressible danger of the act like standing too close to the edge of a cliff or pressing your face to the lion’s cage, but far enough away to be respectful. And all Harry could do was watch as Tom stretched himself out lengthways across the duvet, his legs bent in a half-foetal position, which might appear, to the outside observer at least, as vulnerable. It wasn’t. The curve of his back was too perfected, and Tom kept himself straight at the torso, as though there was a switchblade concealed under his jumper. 

The thought was enough to make Harry nervous—to remind him of the cool expanse of the fridge on his back as Tom pressed the filleting knife into his throat.  
“Are you—are you armed?” he said, the words spilling out before he could stop them on his tongue and swallow them back down. 

Tom glanced up at him with those wide eyes and that oh-so-innocent smile, “you know I don’t need to be, Harry,” he said softly, his eyes wandering down to his lips and watching them with curious fascination that felt so invasive that it was almost embarrassing. And maybe Harry should be embarrassed given he’d just asked a man whose _day-job_ was to kill people whether he had a weapon—of course, he did. “But, believe me,” Tom continued, the slow softness of his tone forcing Harry to listen, “if I wanted you dead, you would have been in Berlin.”

“Why didn’t you, then?”

For one, brief, second, Tom’s smile flickered and there was an expression set into his features that harry would have been inclined to call vulnerability. A genuine unsurety as to why he had bothered to keep him alive; at the time, Harry had assumed it was because Tom was a fan of the thrill but now… now that didn’t seem to quite fit the hole that was left behind. 

He watched as Tom swallowed and licked his lips, that pretty neck stained peach-pink in the sun twisting away to face the bare walls. “I’m… I’m not sure,” he said, and though Harry was prevented from seeing his face, he would have guessed that Tom’s mouth was downturned and he was thinking about how he felt inside for the first time in a long, long, while. 

They stayed in silence for a while, listening only the sounds of each other breathing paired with the romantic noises of the world still rotating, even though in this room, it was motionless. The duvet crinkled loudly between them as Tom turned back over. He stayed there with his easy smile and hollow eyes for long enough that Harry found himself watching his lips; seeing the curve at the bottom and the arch at the top—he wanted to run his fingers over them and feel if Tom was as hard on the inside as he was on the outside. 

But something stopped him from advancing, perhaps, it was the heavy weight of his wedding ring on his finger that he really should take off, or maybe the knot in his throat that reminded him who—or rather _what_ —Tom was. However, for all his supposed qualms, Harry didn’t even flinch when, with the gentlest of movements, Tom reached over to touch his cheek, his fingers lingering on the softest part for a while before tracing the natural contours of his face up to his hairline; just as delicately, he smoothed Harry’s hair back, and Harry couldn’t help but wonder when was the last time Tom touched some—really touched them—without being hyper-vigilant, always waiting for the moment that he would be stabbed in the back by his partner. 

“How about you?” Tom murmured, his fingers still wound up in Harry’s hair, “do you still want to kill me?”

“Yes—I mean—no—I—I don’t know,”

“Do you still think about it?”

_Yes, every waking second._

“No.”

Tom smiled properly now and pulled at Harry’s hair—not hard enough to hurt, but hard enough to feel the tugging on his scalp and to be guided down to lie beside him on the bed.  
When they were lying, side by side, staring at the ceiling with Tom’s fingers still petting at his hair, Tom spoke again. “I think you’re lying, Harry,” he murmured, “I think you sit at your desk and you think about what I’m doing, I think you eat lunch with your colleagues and you think about eating lunch with me,” Tom paused to turn his head in so that the skin on Harry’s neck prickling with his every word, “I think you fuck your wife, but all the time you’re thinking about fucking me.”

Harry swallowed and didn’t look at Tom. Instead, he focussed on the white-wash of the ceiling, now coated in a thick layer of rose-gold and tried to ignore the sound of Tom breathing beside him and the heavy truth of his words still ringing loud in his ears. Yes, it was true. He thought of Tom all the time; in every activity, he was implicitly there, the person that Harry was both striving towards and away from, after all, what would happen if they actually caught him? Just thinking about it made his throat was scratchy, and his heart thrum out of control beneath his skin, and all Harry could do was suck oxygen between his teeth and crack his knuckles as he flexed his hand.

“I think,” Tom continued, “that you wonder what it would feel like to stamp your foot through my ribcage,” he paused to wet his lips again and Harry could feel the heat of his tongue, “and you really want to try, don’t you, Harry?”

Without waiting for an answer that would have never come, Tom leaned over and pulled Harry’s hand over to his chest, pressing it down against his shirt. Harry swallowed again, hard, the material was smooth on his palm, though the buttons caught in the natural grooves and indentations, and beneath, Tom’s skin was almost burning, and his heart was pounding, the pace elevated far above that of a resting heartbeat. 

“Can you imagine putting your foot right here,” Tom murmured, pressing Harry’s hand down into his sternum, the tips of his fingers he brushing over the ridges of Tom’s ribs, “and just pushing down.” As he spoke, Tom’s tone was so soft, breathy, like this was a sacred fantasy and one whose words were being strung right out of Harry’s head. And all the while, Harry could feel how the stride of Tom’s heart now matched his own; deep and heavy as it throbbed between his ribs. 

Although, he wouldn’t—couldn’t—admit it out loud, Harry _did_ want to hear Tom’s bones crack, his ribs splintering under the force of his foot; the sickest part of him wanted to break the skin and push the point of his toe right inside Tom that was a lie—Harry wanted to hold Tom down on his back and reach his whole hand inside him, just pushing down inside him and feeling the edge of his heart with the tips of fingers, scraping it like humans in space rockets scraped at the edge of the stars. 

It was horrific to want things like that. 

What would his boss say? His friends? What would his wife think of him if she knew that he wanted to kill a man? Except he wasn’t sure if he wanted to kill Tom, not anymore, he certainly wanted to punish him for what he did to Cedric, but the act of killing was becoming a vaguer and vaguer concept in his head; a stark vision now wrapped in a veil, like a star that had become a supernova and split itself apart.

So, instead, Harry twisted his hand around so that the palm met Tom’s palm and they could hold hands over Tom’s heart. Both of them listening to the vibrations as it thudded, and like this, they were connected in some important way, two people with the same heart beating in different chests—two men who had monsters under their skin and wild things in their eyes.

“Would you let me do that, Tom?” he said, turning his head ever so slowly to meet Tom’s eyes and to watch his mouth. “Would you let me kill you?”

“If that’s what you want,” Tom murmured, “I would let you try.”


End file.
